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Saturday, June 08, 2013

People often overreact to mistakes, whether their own or somebody else's. Children raised by parents who were too strict grow up to raise their own children too leniently. The same tendency to overcompensate often occurs in religious contexts, such as New Testament scholarship.

Friday, June 07, 2013

Praying to the deceased is an unbiblical and antibiblical practice with no foundation in the earliest generations of church history. See the articles on the subject linked here. The Roman Catholic theologian Ludwig Ott wrote:

I’d like
to make a brief observation about the latest scandal engulfing the Obama
administration. Even liberals are decrying the NSA spying on all Verizon
customers. However, the same liberals decry the profiling of demographic groups
at higher risk of terrorism (e.g. single Muslim males).

Well, the alternative to targeted profiling is universal
surveillance. Everyone becomes a suspect. Conversely, if you object to the NSA
dragnet, then the alternative is to surveil groups more likely to commit
terrorism. Liberals are caught in their own dilemma.

Now, let’s set aside the bigoted way he uses Lana’s previous
(male) name and then puts the pronoun “her” in scare quotes…

I’ll set aside the usual bigotry of his slippery slope
argumentation…

And here Steve’s bigotry can be made even more apparent.

Keep in mind that Carrier espouses naturalistic evolution.
So he’s an ape, calling me a bigoted ape. Why should one ape’s opinion of
another ape matter? And assuming that I’m a bigoted ape, does that violate the
simian code of conduct?

No, I think he’s repulsed by the idea that I’d find a
transsexual woman cute because that implies to him sexual attraction and that’s
supposed to be perverse.

Anyway, what he really seems to be frightened of is not
transgenderism as such but transsexuality in particular.

Carrier has a habit of projecting psychological states onto
his opponent. However, my argument wasn’t based on whether or not
transgenderism is “repulsive” or “frightening,” but whether it’s patronizing
for a self-styled feminist like Carrier to say Lana is “super-cute.”

Maybe he wouldn’t go so far as to concede that men could
dress and act like women if they want to (and women like men); that might still
be too “gross” for him. But I’m speculating.

Another example of Carrier projecting. Actually, there’s a
tradition of tough guys dressing in drag for comedic effect. That’s comical
precisely because it goes against type. It presupposes heteronormative
standards. Macho men can get away with that because their masculinity is
unquestionable. It only works for a he-man. And it’s just a gag. If, by contrast, an effeminate male
dresses in drag, that’s not comical. It’s just pathetic.

Steve, I think, can’t get past that. So he wants to declare
her insane and me dishonest. Because that’s the only way he can sleep at night
trapped inside his insular, hate-filled worldview.

How is Carrier in a position to know that about me? He’s
not.

About six months ago, a Christian blogger on the Triablogue
network (a Calvinist creationist inerrantist by the name of Steve) reacted in
horror that I would think noted transsexual Lana Wachowski was “super cute”
(see Lana Wachowski Is Awesome).

In fact, of course, I said she was “funny, smart, eloquent,
and super cute,” but when you’re a repressed sex-obsessed Christian the only
thing I guess you would notice me saying about her is that she’s physically
attractive (even though those other three attributes I also find sexually
attractive in women, and supercuteness is a property of personality as well as
appearance, but maybe all that’s a little too advanced for a creationist, way
beyond first unit in sexuality 101).

Does he mean Christians are required to practice a degree of
sexual self-control? If so, does Carrier think humans should always act on
their sexual impulses? Exercise no self-restraint whatsoever?

ii) More to the point, it’s revealing that Carrier uses
“cute” as a synonym or “sexually attractive.” So if Carrier says little boys
and girls are cute, does that mean he finds little boys and girls sexually
attractive? If he says kittens and puppy dogs are cute, does that mean he finds
them sexually attractive?

iii) Conversely, suppose I’m watching a Rita Hayworth movie.
In her prime, she was an icon of sex appeal, but “cute” isn’t the adjective
that leaps to mind.

In a post Steve titled Species Dysphoria (in mockery of the
condition called Gender Dysphoria…which used to be called Gender Identity
Disorder, so I don’t know if Steve meant this title as a double insult, since
the condition had just been renamed in diagnostic manuals earlier that year,
downgrading its status from a mental disorder in need of cure to a natural
condition in need of acceptance, in parallel to homosexuality in that same
diagnostic manual decades ago: see APA Revises Manual: Being Transgender Is No
Longer a Mental Disorder).

The APA is highly politicized.

Now, I can excuse someone for not knowing the way the
terminology is actually employed in different technical contexts, since words
can be used in all kinds of ways and laymen often don’t know much about that.
So I’ll just gently correct Steve for not knowing the difference between
gender, sex, and sexuality when they are used in contexts of a person’s
expression and identity.

To begin with, artificially separating gender from biology advances the
sociopolitical agenda of the “trans community.” That’s a tactic of trans
activists. Language is power. Manipulate language to further your radical aims.

But there’s another problem. As Carrier is forced to concede
later on:

Finally, on everything I’ve said above and all to follow
there are still many disagreements in the trans* community, particularly as
they are still trying to develop a culture and a vocabulary to describe their
experience in the face of often intense hostility and bigotry. For example, the
Trans* Awareness Project is reluctant to nail down a precise distinction in the
meaning of transgender and transsexual because their community hasn’t reached
agreement on that. So when I say that “transsexual” most commonly means someone
who takes any physiological steps to alter their assigned sex (which can just
be HRT, for example, producing a male or female biochemistry, or any degree of
SRS) while “transgender” indicates a broader category encompassing anyone who
identifies or expresses a gender different from their assigned sex (even if
they take no physiological steps in that direction), it should be understood
that “commonly” does not mean “always,” and debates about distinctions like
this can still be had.

For instance, at TAP, that distinction is avoided with the
following argument:

The argument has been made that the difference between transgender and
transsexual lies in making a distinction between gender (culture/performance)
and sex (bodies/biology). On the contrary, Transgender rights activist and
lawyer Dylan Vade claims there is no “meaningful difference” between sex and
gender and any definition “that pit biology against psychology or the body
against the mind…denigrates transgender peoples self-identified genders.”

So by his own admission, the terminology is fluid.

I’ll set aside the usual bigotry of his slippery slope
argumentation (implying we’d give transsexuals a pass if they stalked and
killed children, thus further implying transsexuals would do that…no, Steve,
transsexuals aren’t pedophiles any more frequently than anyone else is, and no,
we won’t let transsexuals rape or kill children any more than we let anyone
else do).

i) To begin with, I didn’t use a slippery slope argument. I
didn’t suggest that mainstreaming transgenderism will likely or inevitably lead
to transsexuals raping or killing children. Rather, I used an argument from
analogy to draw a logical comparison. Doesn’t Carrier know the difference?

ii) But since Carrier raises the issue, let’s not forget
that the pedophilia scandal rocking the church of Rome involves LBGT nuns and
priests.

However, there’s a deeper problem. For Carrier goes on to
say:

We should be free to choose the lives we want. So even if
gender was all just a happenstance choice, that shouldn’t make any difference.
Who we like to have sex with, for example, should not be an issue any more than
what our preference in desserts or sports happen to be.

People should be free to choose their lives and not have to
prove they were forced to make their choices just to get their choices to be
respected. And honestly, that should be obvious. Most of what we now do in life
is both unnatural and freely chosen (ever fly in an airplane?), and even the
Christian widely accepts almost all of it as moral or okay.

So what’s wrong with LBGT types raping or killing children?
Isn’t that just another lifestyle choice?

This is reinforced by something else Carrier says:

For example, we are naturally born with violent tendencies.
Yet we neither regard that as moral sanction to be violent nor as an excuse to
“choose” to be violent, as if being born that way made it okay, simply because
our propensity to have those urges was installed in our brain against our will.
Most of human culture involves regulating, altering, advancing beyond or
overcoming our natural tendencies. It does so by in turn drawing on other
natural tendencies (such as make us social and empathic animals, for example)…

So why should we suppress our violent propensities in favor
of our empathetic tendencies, rather than vice versa? From a secular
perspective, why is that not okay? Isn’t Carrier’s preference arbitrary?

Of course, fundamentalist Christians perhaps tend to be
insular and less frequently study foreign or historical cultures and just
assume everything has always been the same. I don’t know. But how a Christian
could not notice that gender expression is a cultural construct is a bit
astonishing.

I attended public school K-12. And, by definition, when we
study the OT and the NT, we are studying foreign historical cultures.

Well, I have some scary news for him. He might be shocked to
know this isn’t so simple as creationism would have it. If God wanted everyone
to be consistently a boy or girl, he wouldn’t have created hermaphrodites. But
more commonly, a significant number of women are actually XY chromosomed (and
thus genetically male but almost entirely physiologically female), the result
of a condition called AIS, or Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, in which they
genetically lack sufficient receptors for androgens and thus do not develop as
men in the womb but as women (only lacking certain internal developments, like
a uterus)…

What on earth does a creationist do with that information?
If by genetic accident you can be XY (and thus genetically a “man” by Steve’s
standards) and yet still a woman (anatomically, biochemically, and legally),
why can’t you be XY and a woman by personal preference? Why should it matter?

One wonders if Carrier is really that ignorant of basic Christian
theology. Not only does Christian theology have a doctrine of creation, it has
a doctrine of the Fall. Due to the Fall, humans are liable to genetic defects.

For example, people vary in “adventurousness” regardless of
their sex, but put those people in a culture that strongly identifies
“adventurousness” as feminine and you’ll see them call having a well-developed
“adventurousness” center of the brain as having a “female” brain.

Is there really a “brain center” for adventurousness?

But the outcome in practice is that some men will feel more
at home living and acting more like women and some women will feel more at home
living and acting more like men, and some cross far enough in that direction to
be uncomfortable living as women or men altogether, because what our culture
has chosen to call “feminine” and “masculine” just happens to align better with
the way their brains and personalities have developed. Since brains and
personalities can develop differently than the cultural ruts we try to force them
in, it makes no sense to keep trying to force them into those ruts. Because
those ruts are human fabrications. They don’t track human biology at all, or do
so only weakly (and a sensible Christian would listen to their own Jesus here:
they ought to follow God’s ruts, not the ruts carved by the traditions of men:
Mark 7:8-9). Whether your brain and personality “fit” being a woman or a man is
all just a happenstance of what culture and time in history you happened to be
born in. But your brain is not a happenstance of that; and your personality,
not altogether.

The Bible would be the first to grant that decadent
societies can misalign biology, gender, and sexual expression. Both the OT and
NT condemn that in pagan culture.

Indeed, with hormone replacement therapy (HRT) and sex
reassignment surgery (SRS), a man can effectively resemble a woman with AIS in
every relevant respect. And since AIS exists in different degrees, men who
identify as women but don’t get surgery or take HRT can still resemble women
with milder cases of AIS. Perhaps the creationist would insist AIS is a
“disorder,” and no one should want to emulate a “disorder,” but in fact it’s
not a disorder. It’s just a natural genetic outcome, which presents few to no
problems. If people are happy being who they become, what business does the
Christian have telling them they’re doing it wrong?

If it’s just a “natural genetic outcome,” then why, by his
own admission, do some undergo hormone replacement therapy or even sex-change
operations?

But let’s put that aside and focus on the real gist of
Steve’s analogy, that a woman who claimed she belonged to a different species
(and acted like it) is exactly the same as a man claiming he’s a woman (and
acting like it). This silly analogy has already been refuted, in many
incarnations, by Zinnia Jones in Being a Woman Also Isn’t Like Being Napoleon.
All genuinely interested parties should read that. Because it’s short and to
the point and illustrates the very crucial mistake the Steves of the world make,
born largely of never actually talking to a transsexual (or listening to one)
before declaring conclusions about what they think or why.

Picture of Lana Wachowski smiling and sitting in her simple
black belted dress and colored hair (in a spectrum of reds and blacks) at the
Human Rights Campaign awards.I doubt Lana believes she is a woman by Steve’s
narrow standards, as if she delusionally thought she has an XX chromosome if
she doesn’t or that she has a womb if she doesn’t or anything else you want to
cling to as your definition of “being a woman.” That’s simply not what’s going
on here. Lana is not delusional about any real facts of the world. She well
knows what her DNA, biochemistry, and body is really like.

Yet Carrier also said: “Identity is generated by the brain.”

So what if your brain self-identifies as lycan? Are you
delusional to think you’re a werewolf if your brain self-identifies as lycan?
By parity of argument, wouldn’t that make the transgendered delusional?

But the major premise of this argument is also false: the
notion that what nature has done to you is good and any deviation from nature
is bad. Artificial hearts pretty much kill that premise outright. So do
corrective lenses (contacts or glasses). So do artificial hips and legs. So do telescopes
and microscopes and airplanes and helmets, all of which allow us to defy nature
by seeing better than nature “intended” and flying contrary to nature’s
“intention” and “fixing” nature by making our heads harder to break and our
eyes less naturally defective. Indeed, we correct nature all the time:
corrective surgery and prosthetics improve the lives of people born with
missing or deformed body parts (or who suffer missing or deformed body parts
through injury or illness); computers and books and pencil and paper correct
for our “imperfectly designed” memories…

This piggybacks on his earlier bungle. Due to the Fall,
humans are subject to illness and senescence. To some extent medical science is
able to restore proper function. Indeed, it’s because humans were designed by
God that there’s a way in which our body parts are meant to function. By
contrast, if naturalistic evolution is true, then it’s not possible for a body
part to malfunction, for the eyes weren’t made to see, ears weren’t made to hear,
hearts weren’t made to pump blood, &c.

…logic and mathematics and the scientific method were
invented to correct for the naturally slipshod “design” of our brain’s
abilities to reason. Nature screwed up almost everything important to us. So we
invented an advanced civilization to correct for all of her mistakes. (And the
fact that we had to do that, entirely on our own, is pretty much argument
number one against creationism.)

If logic is a human invention, then illogic is a human
invention. Equivalent inventions. Carrier reduces logic to a social convention.
But in that event, his arguments have no normative force.

Likewise gender expression and identity. It is the Christian
(or more broadly the whole Judeo-Christian-Islamic complex of religious thinking)
that has singled out sex and gender as somehow special and thus different from
preference in desserts or sports. For no objectively valid reason whatever.
Only when people realize this will they be on the path to freeing themselves
from the slavery of the real delusion that exists here, that of the religious
believer (as I’ve explained in Are Christians Delusional?). The sad thing is
that these delusions bleed over even to infect atheists who don’t even realize
they have internalized purely religious notions about sexuality and gender (as
I’ve noted in my article Sexy Sex Sex!! (for Cash on the Barrel!)).

I appreciate his candid admission that his fellow atheists
are delusional.

Creationists, of course, obsess over what is natural,
because they believe God made us, so if our bodies are born a certain way, for
them that entails God’s endorsement, being the one who made us that way, and
against our will to boot (ironically, considering how much Christians are
usually obsessed with God’s need to give us free will…although Steve is a
Calvinist, so maybe he doesn’t even believe in free will, much less that God
would want us to have any). The problem, of course, is that things like AIS and
chimerism put the kibosh on that kind of thinking. God clearly endorses some
men being women and women being men.

From a Calvinist standpoint, God predestines some humans to
be saints, and others to be sociopaths–to cite two extremes. That’s not a
divine “endorsement.” Rather, the existence of sociopaths serves a purpose in
God’s overall plan for world history–just like a novelist might include
villains as well as heroes and heroines in his story.

Meanwhile, when it comes to the cultural expression and
trappings of gender, the Christian cannot claim divine guidance at all. God
(even the Christians’ own god, by their own account: again, Mark 7:8-9) could
not plausibly have endorsed any one human tradition, and cannot honestly be
imagined to have endorsed any concept of gender. Unless you are still living
and dressing as the Old Testament God had commanded–in other words, as an
Orthodox Jew–you’ve pretty much abandoned any notion of what could ever have
been called “God-sanctioned culture.”

Obviously this behavior is not delusional any more than
preferring broccoli to carrots, or reading to sports, or cowboy culture and
attire to goth or steampunk or yuppy. When women like Dita Von Teese and Paloma
Faith make themselves up in 40s or 50s hairstyle and clothing, they are
creating an identity for themselves, that’s who they want to be. That’s a
preference, not a delusion. And forcing them to be someone they don’t want to
be would almost universally be deemed wrong, indeed bizarre (why would you even
care?), at least in free communities in modernized democracies.

That fails to distinguish between culturebound dress codes
and creational ordinances.

Which leaves us with brain biology. Which leaves us with no
objective reason to claim God did not want Lana Wachowski to live and identify
as a woman.

That’s like saying a novelist wanted a villain in his story.
In a simplistic sense that’s true. Yet he doesn’t want the villain for the sake
of villainy, but to place evil in a moral context.

But alas, since many Christians are obsessed with various
forms of creationism and exaggerate the importance of free will, we can get
more effect on them sometimes by using those irrational levers to convince them
to finally treat their neighbors decently for a change.

Calvinists aren’t routinely accused of exaggerating the
importance of freewill. But I guess there’s a first time for everything.

But this shouldn’t have to be the case with atheists, who,
not being creationists, don’t believe in this naturalist fallacy (that all that
is natural, and only what is natural, is moral), and who, by and large not
being indeterminists, regard free will as nothing more than the expression of
human desires, desires that can be good or bad whether free or not.

i) Actually, many atheists do buy into the naturalistic
fallacy when they espouse evolutionary ethics.

ii) Conversely, natural law ethics is not a naturalistic
fallacy for Christians inasmuch as God commands us to do what he made us to do.
That’s not comparable to the byproduct or end-product of a mindless, amoral
process.

Although fundamentalists do get their panties in a bunch
over almost any conceivable cultural deviation anyway. The rest of us find it’s
perfectly acceptable for someone to “choose” to be Goth or Cowboy or Steampunk
or Yuppy or Preppy or Hippy or anything they like, conforming to any clothing,
mannerisms, dialects, interests, that belongs to any sub-culture they prefer.
No one challenges them by asking whether they were genetically predisposed to
want to be that. No one condemns their choice because it was (gasp!) a choice,
something they just preferred, something they were just happier living as.
Well, except fundamentalist Christians maybe…who also think Goths and Hippies
are abominations, but are arbitrarily okay with Cowboys or Preppies. As if the
Bible laid out which sub-cultures were cool with God and which weren’t.

These subcultures are typically conformist. They have their
own rigid social expectations which you must live up to to be accepted.

(Note to the wise: it doesn’t…except pages and pages of
“You’d better adopt the immensely onerous and detailed culture of an ancient
Orthodox Jew or else you are an abomination before God who deserves to die”
rigamarole [see Leviticus and Deuteronomy], but no fundamentalist Christian
obeys any of that, so they pretty much can’t appeal to the Bible here without
getting themselves in super big trouble.

i) To begin with, I think Carrier is confusing halakhic or
Hassidic customs with the Mosaic Covenant. The latter isn’t that detailed.

ii) The New Covenant minimizes the OT purity codes.

They generally
don’t even follow the New Testament’s requirements that women always cover
their hair and never wear pretty dresses or jewelry.)

What Bible commentaries has Carrier read on 1 Corinthians or
1 Peter?

This point becomes all the more clear when we notice the
fact that we all of us often transgender ourselves when we have “safe”
opportunities to do so. For example, when we play another gender in video
games, role playing games, and even on blogs and social networks. Suddenly
transgenderism in that environment is all okay and not insane.

That reveals a lot about Richard Carrier. I’ve never
transgendered myself.

On a recent edition of his webcast, James White referred to the problematic nature of Roman Catholic claims about a unanimous consent of the fathers. One of the issues he brought up in that context was baptismal regeneration. He didn't elaborate on the point much, so I thought I'd post some links here for anybody who's interested in reading more about the topic. See here for a discussion of some pre-Reformation extra-Biblical sources. And here's an index to many of our articles on issues related to baptism.

For as
often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death
until he comes (1 Cor 11:26).

There are liturgical churches that put great stock in the
real presence. If you don’t believe in the real presence, you are said to
reduce the sacraments to “mere signs” or “nude signs.”

Let’s talk about signs for a moment. The camera is a wildly
popular invention. It’s become even more popular in the age of digital cameras,
cellphone cameras, and Facebook.

Why do people like to take pictures? Well, there are
different reasons. Some people are just narcissistic.

But there are other, better reasons. As timebound,
spacebound creatures, we take pictures to make a particular place or moment
available. If we take a trip to a scenic locale, we may take pictures so that
when we’re no longer there, we can still see it. It’s not as good as being
there, but it’s better than nothing.

When a husband is away at work, he may have pictures of his
wife and kids on the desk. It’s a reminder of what he looks forward to when he
gets off work and returns home.

Likewise, once an event is past, you can’t go back in time
and see it again. So we take pictures to preserve the past. To make the past a
bit more accessible in the present.

That’s one reason parents take pictures of their kids when
they are kids. Kids grow up.

Sometimes pictures can assume an added significance. When
your mother or father was still alive, having their picture may not mean as
much to you as long as you can see them whenever you want to. But after they
are gone, that picture may suddenly mean a lot more to you. You don’t have them
in your life any more. You may have letters. And memories. And pictures. A
picture may be the next best thing to having them. It’s a poor substitute for having
them with you, but that’s what makes death so desolating.

Likewise, parents don’t always outlive their kids. Sometimes
their child dies of cancer or cystic fibrosis, or dies in a traffic accident.

Imagine going into the home of a parent who lost a child.
You see pictures on the mantle. Imagine saying, “But they’re just pictures!”

Well, in a sense that’s true. And you’re not telling the
parent anything he or she doesn’t already know. Painfully so. Acutely so. But that would be a
pretty callous thing to say.

Yes, they’re just pictures, but that’s all the forlorn
mother or has left. It’s not much, but it’s better than total absence. It helps
them retain some sense of connection with the child they lost. Those pictures
are very precious. Mental images can fade.

In addition, when we’re dealing with Christians, where
there’s the hope of reunion in the world to come, those pictures aren’t simply
a memento of the past, but a token of God’s promised restoration.

And that’s like what Paul says about communion in the passage
I quoted. Communion is a ritual depiction that’s both prospective and
retrospective. A commemoration of the Cross as well as a preview of the Second
Coming.

Yes, it’s just a sign, but then, you might say the same
thing about a picture of your late mother or father or grandmother whom you
hope to see again in heaven.

21 So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man,
and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. 22
And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and
brought her to the man. 23 Then the man said,

“This at last is bone of my bones

and flesh of my flesh;

she shall be called Woman,

because she was taken out of Man.”

24 Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and
hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh (Gen 2:21-24).

Why was
Eve made from Adam’s side?

Matthew
Henry famously said: “The woman was made of a rib out of the side of Adam; not
made out of his head to rule over him, nor out of his feet to be trampled upon
by him, but out of his side to be equal with him, under his arm to be
protected, and near his heart to be beloved.”

That’s a sweet sentiment, and it may even be generically
true, but we shouldn’t confuse it with exegesis. There is definitely one, and
maybe two reasons that Eve was made from Adam’s side.

i) The general reason is to stress the unity of man and
woman. They were made for each other because they were made from each other.
Like two halves a whole. That much is clear from the account itself, which
stresses the fittingness of Eve, in contrast to the animals, to be the man’s
companion and counterpart. The “one flesh,” “bone-of-my-bones” bond. Men and
women have a natural, built-in rapport.

ii) But over and above the general reason may be a more
subtle and specific reason for the choice of Adam’s side rather than some other
part of his anatomy. As one scholar notes:

As we have already observed, the language of the garden
scene is found in the tabernacle description; the term sela, here rendered
“ribs,” appears frequently in the construction setting of the tabernacle, there
translated “side.” K. Mathews, Genesis 1–11:26 (Broadman 1996), 216.

Jason
Engwer recently left an informative comment at Michael Brown’s site on why
Josephus fails to mention the massacre of the innocents (Mt 2:16-18). I’d like
to add a few observations of my own:

i) Children are a common casualty of war, and the ancient world
was no exception. The death of a few boys in a small town by Herod’s henchmen
would not be historically noteworthy.

ii) Josephus was born c. 37-38 AD. The Antiquities was
published c. 93-94. So the event took place about 40 years before he was born–or about two generations before he was born. And his magnum opus was
published about a century after the event.

iii) In the age of local and national newspapers, not to
mention photojournalism, CNN, and so forth, it’s easy to have an unrealistic expectation
of the kinds of events that would be newsworthy in the ancient world. But I
think it’s safe to say that ancient people were remarkably ignorant of general
history. They would have known about famous kings and conquerors, as well as
having some knowledge of local lore (where they happened to live), but their
knowledge of the past would be the exception rather than the rule.

iv) Matthew doesn’t record the massacre of the innocents
because that’s a famous event; rather, that’s a famous event because Matthew
recorded it. He made it famous.

To ask why Josephus failed to record this famous event
presumes a frame of reference that Josephus never had. This is only famous in
Christian circles. Known to readers of Matthew’s Gospel. From there it become more
widely disseminated over the centuries by the church and Christmas
celebrations.

The Internet of Things is bigger than we may realize. We are experiencing a shift from a world of inanimate objects and reactive devices to a world where data, intelligence, and computing are distributed, ubiquitous, and networked. My fellow analysts and I at Altimeter Group refer to the Internet of Things (IoT) as the Sentient World. It’s the idea that inanimate objects gain the ability to perceive things, perform tasks, adapt, or help you adapt over time. And, it’s the future of the Internet and consumer electronics.

In 2008, the number of things connected to the Internet exceeded the number of people on earth. By 2020, it’s expected that there will be 50 billion things connected.

A network of things creates an incredible information ecosystem that connects the online and physical world through a series of transactions. In a world where data becomes a natural b[y]-product of these exchanges, developers, businesses, and users alike are faced with the reality that data isn’t only big, its volume and benefits are also overwhelming…

Products such as Fitbit and also Nike’s FuelBand build upon the Human API by collecting the digital breadcrumbs of users and assembling them in a way that makes sense of daily activity and validates progress. Perhaps more importantly, these devices, the data they collect and present, and the social relationships linked by publishing this information in social channels drives the ongoing pursuit of goals, and brings people together to help one another live better. As these devices are connected socially, experiences become the epicenter of engagement and encouragement, inspiring people and networks of people through extended relationships along the way. Imagine if they could also talk to one another…across devices and also across the various contexts of usage, personal, professional, medical, etc.

As I continue to look for a job, I’ve come across a number of different applications for “social media”. I mentioned yesterday, I check and contribute to the Twitter feed now (I’m “@johnbugay”). Yes, it’s dangerous. Yes, @Frank_Turk is “out there”. But we’ve got to keep up with the technology.

One of the things that I’ve found out about Twitter is that there are two kinds of people: those on Twitter, and those who find out later.

If you’re following enough people, the Twitter feed can be a torrent. Jump in, watch it for a few minutes, open 5000 tabs in your browser, then jump out and try to sort it all out.

As a marketer, I do see the value for what I’ve called “shameless self-promotion” on occasion. Jokingly, when people ask, I tell them “I’m a world-famous blogger”. (When Steve Hays first asked me to write for Triablogue, my response was, “it would be the dream of a lifetime”). Yes, I blog on topics that are somewhat arcane, but I’m also aware that I write about things that mean very much and hit close to home to people.

I’ve had a chance to check out “Google Authorship”. As the article recommends, I’ve gone in and updated my profile. You can find it here (and again, I’d like to invite Triablogue readers to connect with me – just please let me know who you are).

But notice that “Google Authorship” does what it’s advertised to do: I typed in “Pope Benedict” (and the Google-recommended top-searches also pop-down), and note whose photo comes up at the bottom of the graphic nearby. The link takes you to the Google+ page where the article appears in my profile.

(I’m not sure if Google just puts my article up for my own benefit, or if the rest of the world can see it. However, it was a pretty amazing thing to see my photo here).

Catholics should speak “the language of truth in love”, not the language of hypocrisy, the Pope said at Mass this morning.

In his homily in the chapel of the Domus Sanctae Marthae at the Vatican, he said: “Hypocrisy is the very language of corruption. And when Jesus speaks to his disciples, he says: ‘Let your language be ‘Yes, yes! No, no.’ Hypocrisy is not a language of truth, because the truth is never given alone. Never! It is always given with love! There is no truth without love. Love is the first truth.

I am wondering, will this pope speak the truth about the early papacy? Vatican I says that “a primacy of jurisdiction over the whole Church of God was immediately and directly promised to the blessed apostle Peter and conferred on him by Christ the [L]ord” and that that primacy was “continual”, “permanent”, and “in every age”.

And yet, as historical research has better understood the early history of the church at Rome, it is clear that for the first 100 years of its existence, that church was fractionated, was led by a network of elders who frequently “fought among themselves as to who was greatest” -- that what we know now as the papacy “developed” from the ashes of those disputes, and didn’t take form until the fifth century.

What is held today as “the primacy of the successor of Peter” is not a historical reality; rather, it is a theological pre-commitment, that can be show to be seriously out of touch with the actual evolution of the church of the first three centuries.

Further, it should be noted, it is agreed that this “office” has led to more contention and division in the history of the church as a whole than any other theological disagreement. Its claims to authority have been rejected every time they have been made, whether Tertullian rejects the claims of Callistus, Cyprian and Firmilian reject the claims of Stephen, or Photius rejects the claims of Nicholas, or the Reformers who rejected the claims of the Medieval papacy.

This pope prefers the title “Bishop of Rome” and goes by his family name, Bergoglio. I wonder if he will remain true to his own calls for truth?

Monday, June 03, 2013

17 Beware of men, for they will deliver you over to courts
and flog you in their synagogues, 18 and you will be dragged before governors
and kings for my sake, to bear witness before them and the Gentiles (Mt
10:17-18).

22 His parents said these things because they feared the
Jews, for the Jews had already agreed that if anyone should confess Jesus to be
Christ, he was to be put out of the synagogue (Jn 9:22).

One
overlooked issue in Gospel harmonization is whether the Evangelists sometimes
changed names and circumstances (or anonymize) to protect the identity of the innocent. Given
that Christians were persecuted by both Roman and Jewish authorities, when a
Gospel writer recorded an incident involving named individuals, he’d have to
consider whether he was painting a bull’s-eye on their back. Depending on when
the Gospels were written, some participants might have died by then, but others
would still be alive, and liable to persecution.

The disciples are named. As official representatives of
Jesus, they can’t evade public scrutiny or persecution. But what about private
individuals caught in the crossfire? It’s possible that Gospel writers shielded
some still living participants by altering details to make it harder for
hostile authorities to finger them. As a rule, I don’t have the same right to
expose others to danger that I have to put myself in harm’s way. I must make
more allowance for their safety than my own.

I'm currently teaching a class in my church titled "Engage the Culture Through the Lens of Genesis," addressing current subjects such as homosexuality, the sanctity of life, and Islam with a Biblical worldview, found in the opening pages of Scripture.

My
statement refers to my inability to verify your claim with my five senses
and/or logic, which are the instruments I normally use in my every day life to
verify the reality of claims.

I am assuming that Steve, you, and I agree that our five
senses and/or logic can give reliable data.

Hector’s appeal to logic raises a troublesome question. From
a secular standpoint, what does Avalos suppose logic is? How does he ground
logic? What’s his ontology of logic?

Does he regard logic as just a systematic description of how
our finite, contingent, timebound simian brains happen to think? If so, how
does he distinguish a logical brain from an illogical brain? Two different
brains can arrive at opposite conclusions. If logic mirrors the brain, what
adjudicates one brain from another?

What about a brain that’s high on LSD? Is that a reliable
brain? He can’t very well say a brain that’s high on LSD is malfunctioning, for
natural selection is not a goal-oriented process. Methodological naturalism
banishes teleological explanations from natural science.

I look towards the wintering trees
To hush my fretful soul
As they rise to face the icy sky
And hold fast beneath the snow
Their rings grow wide, their roots go deep
That they might hold their height
And stand like valiant soldiers
Through the watches of the night

No human shoulder ever bears
The weight of all the world
But hearts can sink beneath the ache
Of trouble's sudden surge
Yet far beyond full knowing
There's a strong unsleeping light
That reaches round to hold me
Through the watches of the night

I have cried upon the steps that seem
Too steep for me to climb
And I've prayed against a burden
I did not want to be mine
But here I am and this is where
You're calling me to fight
And you I will remember
Through the watches of the night
You I will remember
Through the watches of the night

Jesus draw me ever nearer
As I labour through the storm.
You have called me to this passage,
and I'll follow, though I'm worn.

May this journey bring a blessing,
May I rise on wings of faith;
And at the end of my heart's testing,
With your likeness let me wake.

Jesus guide me through the tempest;
Keep my spirit staid and sure.
When the midnight meets the morning,
Let me love you even more.

Let the treasures of the trial
Form within me as I go -
And at the end of this long passage,
Let me leave them at your throne.

Sunday, June 02, 2013

Yes, God can still be the source of your standards like invisible
Martians can be the source of your standards or like Zeus can be the source of your
standards. Or Krishna could be the source of your standards even if you thought
Yahweh was the source.

Merely listing or postulating possible supernatural sources tells
us nothing about the source of your standards because they can be cancelled out
by opposite propositions that are equally possible.

That’s an argument from analogy minus the argument. Avalos
needs to show that claims about Zeus, Krishna, Martians, and Yahweh are
equivalent. All we have is his stipulative comparison.

It is just as possible that YOU are the source of your standards
without violating anything you are calling the ontology of ethics. Nothing about the ontology of ethics demands
that a source be supernatural.

The point remains that, regardless of the source, once YOU MAKE
A DECISION (presuming you believe in free will), then YOU do become the source of
your standards for all practical purposes. And so you DO become a moral relativist
just as is anyone else who chooses what the standard will be regardless of it origin.

Really? If Einstein uses Riemannian geometry to formulate
the theory of relativity, Einstein becomes the source of Riemannian geometry?

And if you ever justify your standards because of the source,
it is still YOU who is justifying that justification.

How does that reduce to relativism?

Actually, it is not that easy to distinguish what Ettore Maserati
intended in any particular car from what his brothers or company engineers intended.
Ettore may not have designed every item in a car that bears his surname. For example,
he may have used a part that was designed by someone else.

If you read about the famous Type V4 Maserati engine, you will
see that The V4 (V stood for the cylinder
formation and its 4 litre capacity) engine was projected by Alfieri Maserati and
designed by Piero Visentini (http://www.maserati-alfieri.co.uk/menotti11.htm)

More importantly, there is difference between entities whose
existence can be empirically verified, and those whose existence cannot be empirically
verified.

Other issues to one side, this confuses empirical agents
with their intentions. Even if the agent is an empirical object, it hardly
follows that his intentions are empirical objects.

We can determine the purposes of human actors if we have enough
information about how their plans matched the results. Presumably, we might have
sketches of cars, for example, that then became reality. We can verify that human
actors do have plans that are executed.

i) Although Ettore Maserati used to be an empirical agent,
he’s been dead a long time.

ii) Does Avalos really think you have to compare sketches of
cars with the results to infer design intentions? What if we had no independent
knowledge of the designer? What if all we had to work with was the end-product:
the sports car. Is Avalos suggesting that we can never reason back from the
results to the intentions of the engineer? If I examine a Maserati, I can’t
infer that this was designed to be a sports car rather than orange juicer?

But, with God, you have a double problem. You are determining
the intention of an entity whose existence cannot be verified in the same manner
as that of Maserati.

Avalos is changing the subject. He originally alleged that
my appeal was “circular.” Now he’s shifted the issue to verification. That’s a
backdoor admission that his original objection failed.

People of different religions and philosophial orientations can
verify the existence of Maserati using simple empirical tools that are not dependent
on religious presuppositions.

i) Once again, Avalos is shifting the issue from identifying
intentions to verifying the existence of the agent. Those are distinct issues.

ii) It’s unnecessary to directly verify the existence of an
engineer. The car didn’t very well design itself. You can indirectly infer the
existence of the engineer from the car.

In addition, Maserati is finite being with finite attributes
that can be detected by human beings. But determining God’s purposes is not the
same. He is said to have infinite attributes that I, as a finite being, cannot verify.
I have no information about his purposes that I can verify.

i) I don’t know where Avalos comes up with the claim that
God is said to have infinite attributes. Who says that? At most, God is said to
have the attribute of infinity. Having infinite attributes and having an
attribute of infinity are not convertible propositions.

ii) In addition, it’s a question of how divine infinity is
defined in systematic theology. Usually it’s taken to mean that God is
unconditioned by space and time.

Avalos seems to be using “infinite” in a quantitative sense,
but Christian theology doesn’t predicate an infinite number of attributes to
God. So Hector’s claim is ignorant.

iii) But let’s play along with infinity for the sake of
argument. Is Avalos claiming that we can have no knowledge of infinitely
complex objects? What about the Mandelbrot set (to take one example)? Is that
unverifiable? Is that unknowable?

So, no, I am afraid your analogy between determining the purposes
of an infinite being, whose existence is questionable in the first place, is not
the same as determining the purposes of a finite being whose existence and activities
can be empirically verified.

My statement refers to my inability to verify your claim with
my five senses and/or logic, which are the instruments I normally use in my every
day life to verify the reality of claims.

i) What about reality claims involving abstract objects?
These are not empirically verifiable. Yet they may be explanatorily
indispensable.

Likewise, I can’t empirically verify my own mental states.
Does that mean the existence of my mental states is questionable?

ii) Avalos appeals to logic, yet hasn’t he condemned
subjective appeals as circular and relativistic? After all, it is Avalos who is
using logic.

I am assuming that Steve, you, and I agree that our five senses
and/or logic can give reliable data.

As a Christian, I think the five senses are generally
reliable because God designed them. If I were an atheist, if my brain and
senses were the outcome of a mindless, hit-and-miss process, then
my brain and senses would not be trustworthy.

So, yes, any statement about your god (or whatever you call God)
is unverifiable because I cannot verify it my five senses an/or logic and not because
I simply say so.

So, it is no more circular than saying that I cannot verify that
undetectable Martians are playing chess right now.

Suppose the first space probe to Mars discovered a chess set
on Mars. Suppose the probe was unable to detect the presence or prior existence
of Martians. Even so, would we not be able to infer intelligent life from the
alien chess set?

If I am wrong, then simply show me a way to verify those claims
about God with our fives senses and/or logic.

There are both a priori and a posteriori theistic proofs.
Likewise, you have the argument from prophecy. I could say more, but that’s a
start.

Thank you
for clearing up that confusion between the epistemology of ethics and the ontology
of ethics. I must have missed that day in my philosophy courses, which I imagine
are much better at RTS.

Avalos has a strange obsession with my RTS degree. What
accounts for that obsession?

i) I believe Avalos started out life as poor Mexican. Folks
who come from humble backgrounds are sometimes dogged by a persistent
inferiority complex. They compensate for their sense of shame by becoming
social climbers. Avalos is pitifully status-conscious.

By contrast, impressing others has never been the goal of my
life. I grew up middle class. Most of my neighbors and classmates were middle
class. We were average. And I never aspired to move higher up the social
ladder. That’s not what I live for.

ii) Avalos is very proud of his Ivy League education. Keep
in mind, though, that from an evolutionary standpoint, Avalos is just a
college-educated monkey. At the end of the day, a monkey who struts around the
quadrangle is still a monkey. Even though Avalos suffers from an emotional
craving to rise above his humble socioeconomic origins, he can’t rise above his
evolutionary origins. He’s just one notch above the Orangutan. An ape with an electric razor.

iii) For the record, I was already past 40 when I entered
the RTS degree program, so it’s not as if that’s where I got my ideas. I had a
fully-formed worldview long before I started RTS.